One Year of Letters from Leo — A Love Letter From a McDonald’s Off St. Peter’s Square

Letters from Leo was born over an espresso in the crowds after Pope Leo XIV’s election. One year and 35,000 subscribers later, I’m back at the same table with a heart full of gratitude — and an invitation.

The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica rises behind a sign pointing the way — three minutes — to the McDonald’s at Borgo Pio 93, where Letters from Leo was conceived in May 2025.

Today, Letters from Leo turns one year old. If this community has carried you the way it has carried me, the best birthday gift you can give is to become a paid subscriber — and if you already are one, a one-time gift to fuel the year ahead.

Dear friends,

I’m writing to you from a McDonald’s a few hundred steps off St. Peter’s Square.

This is an emotional essay for me to write. Most days I bring you the facts as I see them and explain why they matter to our country and to our church. Today I’m setting the analysis aside. What follows is purely a message from the heart — a heart of gratitude.

One year ago today, on July 2, 2025, Letters from Leo became a daily publication covering Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, and his impact on American politics. Today is the birthday. I’m celebrating it at the place where the whole thing was conceived.

Letters from Leo was conceived at this very McDonald’s in May 2025. The birth came two months later, when these letters began arriving daily.

The story of how I got to Rome at all begins twelve years earlier. On the day Pope Francis was elected in 2013, I was a broke 23-year-old political staffer in Washington, watching the announcement on television through tears of joy. The next morning I opened a savings account for a pilgrimage I could not yet afford and promised myself I would be in Rome for that man’s funeral.

My reaction to the election of Pope Francis on March 13, 2013 — the day before I opened the savings account that would eventually take me to Rome.

Month after month I set aside what I could — through a career that ran from Catholic outreach for President Obama into a decade in the secular, often brutal world of American politics. When the sad news came last April, I emptied that old humble account and booked my flight.

My plan was to pay my respects as a pilgrim and fly home. My gut kept telling me to stay for the conclave, and Newsweek and TIME graciously arranged the credentials that made staying possible so I could cover the event for both magazines.

Then came the white smoke. When Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago stepped out onto the loggia as Leo XIV, the roar of that square carried something I had never once heard in politics — hope without cynicism. I felt deep in my bones that God had given us this American pope for such a time as this.

In the days after the election, the crowds around St. Peter’s Square were nearly impossible to disperse. When I finally left the square, I couldn’t find a seat anywhere in the neighborhood, so I sat down here, ordered an espresso — which you can do at a McDonald’s in Rome — and downloaded Substack. Before the cup was empty, I had created this newsletter.

I didn’t write a word for a few weeks afterward. But this is the birthplace, right here at this table, and returning a year later to see how far the project has traveled has me holding back tears over a dingy paper espresso cup.

Thirty-five thousand of you now read these letters. Together, we have become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the United States and the number-one newsletter in the country on Pope Leo XIV and American politics.

Based on our rapid growth trajectory, this community could reach one million readers by the 2028 election. Imagine what a body of citizens that size — hopeful, formed, and engaged — could do for a country starving for moral clarity.

All of it is because of you — your faithfulness, your loyalty, your feedback, your reading. You decided these letters were worth your time, and that decision built everything we have.

Pope Leo XIV celebrates the first Mass for the Care of Creation in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo on July 9, 2025.

This week our country stands on the precipice of its 250th birthday. America exists because free people, formed by their faith and their ideals and their love, stood up to tyranny.

Letters from Leo is a distinctly American project that is also, down to its bones, a Catholic one. The world spent centuries insisting those two identities could not live together in one heart. Their union is precisely what gathers us into one community.

I hold a dogmatic belief that we are living through a providential moment. God once raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism; I am convinced he has now raised up a pope from the Americas to help defeat MAGA authoritarianism and to call our nation back to a land of dreams and dignity for all who inhabit it.

I have no idea what the next year will bring for this newsletter. For the year behind us, though, I know exactly whom to thank.

When I was a young man growing up in Tennessee and starting to take my faith seriously, I read a book about the lost boys of Sudan, some of whom found refuge after the war in Middle Tennessee. The book itself, whose title I’ve long forgotten, left little impression on me. Its final line has stayed with me my entire life. At the end of their long journey, the boys said: “God has outdone himself with this community.”

I repeat those words today about this community. God has outdone himself with Letters from Leo — with the gift of our growing together.

I believe with my whole heart that this project can be a means of redemption for a country in bad need of redeeming. I want to write the next chapter of our country’s history with you — a chapter in which no one is unheard, unseen, or unloved.

Make no mistake: a newsletter could never contain what we are building here. The point was always larger than a chronicle of events. Our mission is to help free this country from the tyranny of these times and the authoritarianism bearing down on our necks.

Somewhere along the way I began to think of this work as a kind of secular priesthood — my imperfect effort to carry the light of Christ’s love into the public square.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the ideal messenger. Writing about faith in the brutal arena of American public life is uncomfortable and, at times, deeply exposing.

I’m a sinner in need of God’s mercy, and I don’t pretend to hold many of the answers for how to make our nation more just, more humane, and less cold.

I keep going because what Pope Leo is doing has the power to change our world for the better, and that happens by more and more people knowing him and his story.

On Saturday — the Fourth of July, 250 years to the day since free people declared their independence from a king — I will be in Lampedusa on your behalf. Pope Leo XIV has chosen to spend our nation’s birthday there, among migrants and refugees at the edge of Europe.

Pope Leo XIV greets the faithful at Mass during his June 2026 visit to Spain’s Canary Islands, where he honored migrants lost at sea.

I will stand on that island looking at the American pope, believing in him, in us, in this moment, and in the faith that insists we are the community that will help our country overcome these times.

As much as a human being can love an institution, I love my country and I love our church. Outside of my family, nothing matters more to me. I am an American and a Catholic by birth and by choice, and I intend to spend the coming years working with you to bring out the best of both.

If the energy of this moment has found you the way it has found me — if love of home and country stirs something in you, and your faith presses you toward action — then join me. Together, let’s make this blessed but broken country, and the church we love, something more blessed still.

So here is my ask.

Letters from Leo is sustained entirely by readers like you. We have no corporate sponsors, no institutional backing, and no billionaire benefactor waiting in the wings — only ordinary people choosing to invest in something they believe matters.

When Pope Leo took possession of his cathedral in Rome last spring, he reached for the words of John Paul I: “I offer you the little that I have and am.” I make that offering my own tonight, from a strange little McDonald’s off St. Peter’s Basilica, in this uniquely merry American experience of our Catholic faith.

To paraphrase Peter: silver and gold I have none, but what I have I give — my back, my mind, my heart, and my love for this church and this country, both of them blessed, both of them broken. I believe in us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission — the perfect way to help if you’re already a paid subscriber.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive everything we publish, including the biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the Sunday scripture reflections, the Epstein-Bannon investigation, and Pope Leo Takes On AI.

And if you’re someone who prays, I humbly ask for your prayers — for me, for this project, and for Pope Leo XIV, who carries a very heavy cross.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

This has been the most extraordinary year of my life, and you made it so.

There is a long road ahead, and none of us can walk it alone. Let us rise, then, fellow travelers, and continue on our way.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

P.S. — If you’d like to make a larger gift through a credit card, check, family foundation, or donor-advised fund, reply to this email or send us a message. We’ll gladly help you invest in our mission.